The year that changed the world : the untold story behind the fall of the Berlin Wall / Michael Meyer.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-238) and index.

1. Genesis -- 2. The Wall -- 3. Democracy on the Danube -- 4. A Miraculous Conversion -- 5. Parallel Universes -- 6. The Hungarian Connection -- 7. High Noon -- 8. Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, or Hieronymus Bosch's Hell -- 9. The Great Escape -- 10. Vortex of Change -- 11. A Kiss of Death -- 12. The Fall -- 13. Aftermath -- 14. Denouement.

"On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Michael Meyer provides an eyewitness account of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe that rewrites our conventional understanding of how the Cold War came to an end and holds important lessons for America's current geopolitical challenges. He shows that American intransigence was only one of many factors that provoked world-shaking change." "Meyer draws together on-the-ground accounts of the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin. But the most important events, Meyer contends, occurred secretly, in the heroic stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright, Vaclav Havel in Prague; the Baltic shipwright Lech Walesa; the quietly determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who privately realized that his empire was already lost, and decided - with courage and intelligence - to let it go in peace, Soviet general secretary of the communist party, Mikhail Gorbachev." --BOOK JACKET.